The banality of artistry

Yes that title is a failed reference to the essay I am currently reading, in short - The Banality of Evil (Hannah Arendt).

Had my first painting class this morning from 8 am to 12 pm. For a 4 hour class, after the teacher stopped droning, time sure passed nice and swiftly. Today's task was to mix colors. Does that mean I made a color wheel? Oh no, I am way too advanced to make a color wheel, instead I decide to make color circles in a balloons floating up into the sky fashion. I worked mixing paints around on my glass palate adding reds to yellows to greens to blues. Slowly my paper began to look like a gumball machine let loose upon the world.

After working on this for 3 hours I turned the paper around to get a better look at my piece only to realize that it... sucked. The colors were all in a disarray, there was too much of a premeditated randomness to the positioning of the color blots and even the colors themselves didn't interest me. What I had thought was so creative and interesting in the beginning by the end seemed to me to be my idea of Art with a capital A (reference to Chris Killip's disdain for Photographs with a capital P), what "art" should be, not something I had any feeling for. Not to mention someone else in the class did the exact same thing I did, except better. Damn.

I clearly have too many preconceived notions of what art should be and thus I cannot create anything truly original or representational of me.

I guess we'll see how it goes on Thursday.